July arrived as hot as promised. The Knicks won hearts, and for about two weeks New York remembered it actually likes people. Group chats gathered with no RSVP required. Just a location to meet, and the understanding that the “running 30 min late” text was unnecessary. Five boroughs high-fiving the strangers spilling onto sidewalks. It didn't last, obviously. Nothing here does. I’m reminded of what Fitzgerald said, “the sentimental person hopes things will last, whereas the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.” I just discovered I’m a romantic.
Somewhere in that stretch I became a triathlete again, the way I do every summer, without meaning to. It happens on its own. You start running because the heat makes sitting indoors feel like a moral failure, and before long you're at the East 90th Street entrance into Central Park, striding around the Reservoir, past the ever impressive Park and Fifth Avenue co-ops and townhouses built for families whose lineage long ended. I stop in Andrew Carnegie's old garden to catch my breath. Free entry now. He'd probably have hated that.
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The garden belongs to the Cooper Hewitt design museum, which is really just Carnegie's old house with better lighting. Designed by Babb, Cook & Willard in 1902, its Georgian Revival grandeur with Beaux-Arts flourishes was the architectural equivalent of quietly reminding everyone you're the richest man in the room. He built it far uptown on purpose, ahead of anyone else. Most of his neighbors' mansions didn't survive the century. Upkeep on a house like that eventually bankrupts even the idea of taste, and one by one they came down for apartment buildings. Including mine.
It's quite the subtle joke, because condominium apartments as we know them didn't exist here until the 1960s. Before that, everyone was a co-op rejection away from homelessness. Now the newcomer buildings arrive dressed as the old guard: Developer Naftali Group building limestone towers with the late Robert A.M. Stern at 200 East 83rd, 255 East 77th, The Bellemont on East 86th, and The Benson by Peter Pennoyer on East 79th, giving a very convincing impression of buildings that have always been there. I love and would live in any of them. Real estate's version of Nicole Kidman dancing around Constantin Brancusi's Danaïde.
None of these out-snob 740 Park Avenue, still standing since 1930. Rosario Candela's answer to the question nobody asked: what if a mansion just kept going up instead of out? A few blocks over, the neighborhood keeps doing this thing where every era agrees to be cordial. The Met, the Neue Galerie restored by Annabelle Selldorf next door, merging with the Met by 2028 though it'll keep its name and its walls, and Sotheby's, which just packed up its whole operation and moved into the old Brutalist Breuer building on Madison and 75th. A building that used to house a museum now sells the art instead of hanging it. New York's version of character development.
Eventually the sun stops being charming and starts being a threat as the days widen as long as the wall-to-wall sisal carpeting in a pre-war walk-up, so I go swim laps at Asphalt Green’s olympic-style 50-meter pool. New days begin with cycling the Central Park loop endlessly and early enough that the ever-changing skyline full of new supertalls look like they’re showing off just for me. Tired, I get a coffee. Cold brew, no milk or sugar, simple but flavorful nonetheless. Dieter Rams taught me “less, but better.” That's the whole system. After thirteen years in New York, it’s not complicated. It’s natural, and completely lovely.
